The House of Velvet and Glass (47 page)

The pattern formed a dark black cloud, thick and oily. Then the cloud pulled apart like the curtains of a
tableau vivant
, revealing the circle of braying men, frozen like insects in amber.

“Well, how d’you like that,” Lannie breathed. He shifted the angle a hairsbreadth, and the scene sprang to animated life. The men shouted, urging on the two fighters. But something was different: this time, the other man didn’t lunge for Johnny’s throat. Instead, Johnny’s fist connected with the stranger’s jaw. When the man’s head rocked back from the blow, Lannie saw that he was Tom. The older sailor reeled, and the crowd roared its approval.

On the outskirts of the crowd, struggling to shoulder his way through, Lannie saw himself. His muscles tensed as he willed himself to hurry, to stop the fight. But this time the crowd held Lannie fast, and though he was screaming for them to stop, his cries went unheeded.

Johnny, younger and faster, landed two blows for every one of Tom’s, but the sailor was larger, a meaty slab of a man. He absorbed Johnny’s fists, and the young scholar’s face purpled with each strike. Every explosion of blood egged the sailor on to a greater intensity of fury.

“Hurry,” Lannie urged himself. “What d’you think you’re doing? Hurry! You’ve got to stop it!”

“See?” Johnny’s voice interjected from overhead. “Told you it would change.”

Lannie didn’t respond. His hands tightened around the teacup, tension causing the surface of the water to tremble.

Then a glinting flash, so fast that he felt rather than saw it, and Tom’s hand darted forward like an eel from inside a reef hole attacking a passing fish. A red dot appeared on Johnny’s chest, and Tom stood back, his face a twisted grin of triumph. Johnny’s mouth opened in surprise, and he slid to his knees, bringing his hands up to the dot, which spread to the size of a saucer, then a dinner plate. Johnny’s hands reached forward, grasping at nothing, and he collapsed forward. A puff of dust billowed up when his body hit the ground.

The men watching the fistfight shifted, and Lannie finally freed himself, elbowing forward until he reached Johnny on the ground. Lannie knelt, placing a hand on the scholar’s back. The other men pulled away, making room. Lannie bent down, shaking his shoulder, receiving no response.

He shook again.

Out in the real world, Lannie’s eyes widened in panic, and he whispered, “Wake up. You’ve got to,” though he wasn’t sure if he was addressing Johnny in the tea leaves, or himself.

No response from the boy on the ground. Lannie slowly got to his feet, unfolding to his full height. His face contorted with a righteous fury that the real-world Lannie had never experienced.

He swiveled to face Tom, who was shouting at the other men, his face red, pointing first at himself, and then at the boy on the ground. The crowd parted as Lannie prowled nearer the older sailor. He carried a knife. Instead of acting in defense of Johnny, Lannie saw that he had transformed into an instrument of revenge.

“I can’t!” Lannie cried out, overcome with horror.

He hurled the teacup aside with a sob and threw himself onto his stomach, burying his face in his arms.

“Yankee?” the scholar asked. Lannie felt rustling as Johnny peeked over the edge of his bunk, then climbed down and sat alongside him. Lannie trembled, not looking up.

“Lan? Are you all right?” the young man asked. A tentative hand on his shoulder. He shook his head, not wanting Johnny to see his face.

“I’m sorry,” the scholar said, hesitant. “I thought it would help with your jaw. I never thought it’d hit you so hard. I didn’t. I guess I shouldn’t have brought you here.”

Still Lannie trembled, gulping down his sobs. A wave of homesickness swept through him, so crushing that it squeezed his breath away. He hated being in this strange country, surrounded by people he didn’t understand. He hated the ship, and everyone on it. He longed to be home, tucked under a quilt in the four-poster bed in his room at the top of the stairs in the Chestnut Street house, his sister thumping down the hall and rapping on his door, the sound of his mother singing downstairs as she bent over her sewing.

At the thought of his mother Lannie’s sobs broke through his shame and reserve. Under the cover of his arm, his face buried next to the chronometer, Harlan Plummer Allston Junior keened for himself, for his lost childhood, for his loneliness, and for the horrors that he had conjured from within his own mind.

“Lan,” Johnny tried again. “It’s not real, you know. None of it’s real. Didn’t it change?”

Lannie opened one eye and let it swivel to peer through a mesh of his hair back at the scholar.

“It did, didn’t it?” Johnny said.

Lannie nodded, wiping his bubbling nose with the back of a hand, which served only to smear mucus into the sleeve of his already filthy linen shirt.

“Well, there, see? It’s nothing to be worried about. It’s all just made-up lotus flower craziness from inside your miserable Yankee head.”

“It was—” Lannie’s voice caught on a fresh sob. “It was so much worse. Johnny, I saw—I saw—” He couldn’t finish, squinting his eyes against the memory.

“Ah,” Johnny said, sitting back. He rubbed a hand over his face and sighed, resigned. “I think you’re very tired. And I think you’re far from home. And I think I’ve forgotten you’re younger than me.”

At this gentle challenge Lannie sat up, wiping his face. “I’m not much younger than you.”

“Oh, no? How old are you, cabin boy?” Johnny asked with a wry smile, folding his arms.

“Seventeen,” Lannie grumbled, cross at being made to feel like a child.

“Seventeen!” the scholar exclaimed. He laughed, throwing his head back. “Oh, dear. It’s worse than I thought. But you’re so tall! You are like a baby giant. What do they feed you, anyway, in the New England?” He got to his feet, still laughing. “Come on. Time to go.”

“Why,” grumbled Lannie. “How old are you, then?”

“I,” Johnny said, pulling himself up to his full height, which was half a head shorter than Lannie, “am twenty!” The young man pounded a fist against his chest with pride of manhood attained.

“Oh, I see. You think you’re more man than I am? ’Cause you’re older?” Lannie asked, smiling, folding his own arms over his chest.

Johnny smiled back, relieved at the change in Lannie’s mood. “I never implied such a thing. Never.”

“That’s good. ’Cause I couldn’t let a thing like that stand.”

“Of course you couldn’t. Now come along.”

Lannie climbed back into his coat, stuffing the chronometer in his pocket, and the two young men stepped back into the streets of the Old City of Shanghai.

Chapter Twenty-four

Harvard University
Department of Social Ethics
Cambridge, Massachusetts
May 7–8, 1915

“Right,” Benton said. “Are you ready?”

Sibyl folded her hands before her on the soapstone laboratory table and slowly nodded her head.

The front of the laboratory classroom featured a chalkboard, marked with chapter assignments on mental hygiene. By the chalkboard hung an orangutan skeleton, its skull in a disturbing, sharp-toothed grin. A few specimen jars stood grouped on the desk at the front, full of parasitic worms preserved in alcohol. The room was lit by an electric fixture overhead, and the building was so quiet that Sibyl could hear the filaments buzzing within the lightbulbs.

Benton arrayed before him the implements of his experiment: a notebook, a fountain pen, a pocket watch with a sweep second hand, the library copy of the anthropological textbook
Le Sang de Morphée,
turned to a page titled
Hypothèse sur les opiacés et la précognition
, a glass ampule of amber fluid, a leather zipper case, and the wooden box containing the scrying glass. Benton checked this array against the list in the textbook, and he nodded.

“Here’s how it’ll work, everything on the level. To begin with, we’re in a sterile laboratory environment, without any spectators.” Sibyl’s eye wandered to the ape skeleton and the jars of worms, but she didn’t bother to disagree with him. It certainly wasn’t like Mrs. Dee’s parlor, or Dovie Whistler’s secret club. She turned back to Benton and nodded her assent.

“Right. The first thing to do, is we give you a shot of morphine.”

“We do what?” she exclaimed.

“But of course,” he said, unzipping the little leather pouch. It was actually a small medical kit, containing a metal syringe and several different gauges of interchangeable hypodermic needles. At the sight of the needles, some of which were quite large, she felt a slippery faintness creeping over herself. The blood drained from her face, leaving her skin clammy and green.

“Is that . . .” she struggled to say. “Are you sure that’s necessary?”

“Why, I should think so. It’s the only surefire way to control the dosage we give you. Everything else is too variable. Syrups, opium from poppies, even laudanum varies drastically from batch to batch, and among manufacturers. That is, incidentally”—he paused, cocking a pointed eyebrow at her—“one of the things that makes these substances so dangerous. Morphine, on the other hand, we can measure out down to fractions of a grain. And that’s just what we’re going to do.”

Sibyl started rolling up one of her blouse sleeves, knowing that Benton was right. “It’s just that I’m rather . . .” She swallowed, the clamminess spreading under her arms and into her belly. “I’m rather uncomfortable with needles, I’m afraid.”

“It’ll be over before you know it,” he said. He chose one of the smaller gauges and wiped it off with a dampened cloth before screwing it into place on the syringe. “Now then,” he said, examining the textbook. He made a brief calculation in his head, and snapped the top off the glass ampule. “While I’m doing this,” he said, “why don’t you tie a tourniquet around your upper arm?”

At this suggestion the oily cloud bubbled up in the corners of Sibyl’s vision, and she had to struggle to keep herself sitting upright on the laboratory stool. “Benton,” she said, voice thick. “I’m not so sure about this.”

He lowered the syringe and fixed a cool eye on Sibyl. “Oh, come now. You can’t be afraid of this. It’s nothing.” He waved the needle for emphasis.

Without warning Sibyl leaped from the stool and stumbled out of the classroom, one hand over her mouth, groping for the door. Her footsteps echoed as she blundered through the dark, finally shouldering open the door to the lavatory at the end of the hall. She caught a passing sight of herself in the mirror and, seeing the gray pallor of her face, leaned over the sink and was violently ill.

After collecting herself in the men’s room of the social ethics building, Sibyl, with more pink to her cheeks, stepped back into the laboratory. The orangutan skeleton grinned its skinless grin at her.

“Feeling better?” Benton asked, his tone light. She found him sitting with his arms folded across his chest, trying not to smile at her.

“It’s not funny,” she said as she retook her seat on the laboratory stool.

“Mmm,” he said, busying himself with the syringe. Without looking up, he added, “It’s a little funny.”

“It’s not!” she countered, but she was fighting back a smile. She rolled her sleeve up and fitted a tight band around her upper arm.

“I don’t suppose I have to point out to you the fact that you don’t bat an eye trying a strange drug among a bunch of nefarious people down in Chinatown, but the same substance in a safe, scientific context causes you to faint?”

“No,” Sibyl said. “You don’t have to point that out. I was well aware of that already.”

“You’re a spitfire, Sibyl Allston. I would never’ve thought it.”

She rolled the pale expanse of her inner elbow upward and rested her arm on the laboratory table. Then Sibyl turned her face away, eyes and nose scrunched together in anticipation of the coming prick.

But it didn’t come.

“What are you waiting for?” Sibyl asked, opening one eye to peek at what Benton was doing. She saw that he was staring at his watch.

“I have to note the time,” he said absently. “Few more seconds. And—there.”

As he spoke the needle slid into her arm, and Sibyl squeaked, turning her face away. When she looked again, Benton was cleaning and putting away the syringe.

“Precisely ten o’clock,” he said. “Now, we wait. Shouldn’t be too long.” Sibyl watched as he set aside the medical kit and began to unpack the wooden box containing the scrying glass. She felt the tiny tremors in her hands subside.

“How long?” she asked. Already her lips felt loose and numb, and a puddle of bliss was spreading through her shoulders.

Benton set the crystal ball before her and took up the fountain pen. “Any time. Whenever you’re ready. Now, your job will be to narrate for me. You have to tell me what you’re seeing. Even if it’s nothing, or you don’t understand what it is. All right? I’ll note everything down, and keep track of the time. And then we’ll see where we are.”

Sibyl’s gaze sank from Benton’s face to the scrying glass, cold and inert under the dim electric lights. She raised her hands, which moved with slow deliberation, as if under water, and brought her fingertips to rest on its surface.